New music
Thomas H. Green
Coming off the back of million-selling soul concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, the third album of Plan B - who is soon to be seen as George Carter (the Dennis Waterman role) in the remake of The Sweeney - is a belated soundtrack to his feature film ill Manors.Ben Drew’s 2006 debut was the sweary, snarling urban youth apocalypse and Daily Mail nightmare, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words? His latest returns to the same gritty British hip-hop territory, but with harsher criminality and disgusted social commentary. It is of a piece with the film, dropping in snippets Read more ...
howard.male
What function does a critic even serve at an event like this? Some of the best Colombian musicians across several generations are playing some of the best music Colombia has ever produced to an audience that largely consists of blissfully happy Colombians on Colombian Independence Day. But before the party got into its stride there’s a non-Colombian support band to consider. And consider them we must, because Ghanaian Afro-funk band Konkoma were as coolly polished and insidiously funky as the headline act.Like Ondatrópica they take much of their inspiration from the dance music of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Blur: 21Bruce DessauThe recent closure of Word magazine has been seen by some as linked to the demise of "Fifty Quid Man". Who can afford such a wallet-frightening splurge these days on the kind of music the monthly's writers wrote so eloquently about? Well, have a chat with your friendly bank manager because this lavish tribute to the winners of the Britpop long game retails at £134.99 and is just about worth it. Every stage of Blur’s career is here – apart from, annoyingly, one their recent new tracks, "The Puritan" – charting the band's evolution from pre-Madchester incarnation Seymour to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Sellars has a talent for controversy, from his early days when he was the director who brought you Così fan tutte set in a diner on Cape Cod, Don Giovanni as a cocaine-snorting, Big Mac-eating slum thug, and Figaro getting married in Trump Tower. At his best, in John Adams's Nixon in China, Saariaho’s L’amour du loin, or his Teodora at Glyndebourne, the results have been some of the freshest and most inspiring stagings of new music seen in recent times. Anyone who has met him knows he is a brilliant polymath, extremely charming and charismatic, even if many hate his haircut (see Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The omens did not augur well for this one. Under The Bridge, a venue beneath Chelsea Football Stadium, used to be an iffy nightclub called Purple but has been redesigned by the man behind America’s House of Blues chain into a shiny visual fusion of TGI Friday's and the Hard Rock Café. Industrial girders are visible in the ceiling and the walls are plastered in top-notch rock and pop photography but, overall, there’s an ersatz, squeaky-clean vibe that’s going to take some piercing by any act who takes the stage.I turn to my right and there’s Mick Hucknall of Simply Red. What do I do? Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The sacred word 'om' is spoken in different ways according to its context. Elongated, it can be stretched over multiple syllables. As a musical unit, OM work with building blocks that are similarly minimal, yet drawn out for maximum effect. And like the origins of their name, their heady, psychedelic music is heavily indebted to cultures which lie to the east.California’s OM were originally vocalist/bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius. Both used to be in drone/metal outfit Sleep. After a late-2007 five-hour live set in Jerusalem, Hakius left and was replaced with Emil Aros. Although Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Madonna earned her place in the pop elite many years ago, and there are many reasons for this, which needn't be reduced into a list. Certainly though, a big reason will be the obvious - how much better her fans' lives are with her songs in them. And 65,000 of them turned up in Hyde Park to see the spectacle and dance to the hits. Her latest album MDNA may be a weak, disengaged affair with singles that have failed to chart well, but with a back catalogue like no other, there was a huge expectation that its best moments may be reinvigorated for the live setting - or at least swarmed with Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Paloma Faith has always struck me as a few cuts above your average conveyor belt post-Winehouse soul sister. A recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show in which she gave Russell Brand as good as she got in the verbals department suggests that there's more to this former magician's assistant than meets the eye. And 15 minutes into last night's gig, the first of her two shows as part of Somerset House's Summer Series, she firmed up her gobby intellectual credibility by name-dropping lefty post-Structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.This intriguing moment came during some Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Brian Fallon, The Gaslight Anthem’s heart-on-sleeve frontman, would be the first to tell you that there’s nothing complicated to it: big songs with tons of heart; love and death and the last light of fading youth, all to the accompaniment of your favourite songs on the radio. Inspired in no small part by hometown heroes (let’s get the Springsteen references out of the way early, shall we?), the New Jersey band’s major-label debut ramps up the big rock choruses, but retains an intimacy through its wistful lyrics and Fallon’s bruised vocal delivery.Lead single “45” delivers a typically anthemic Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Before last December’s O2 Deep Purple gig, I heard one denim-clad middle-aged man arguing to another that the absence of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was irrelevant. Rather, without keyboardist Jon Lord, this was Purple in name only. Moreover the band had brought an orchestra along. What a cheek, given that Deep Purple’s iconic Concerto for Group and Orchestra had been 100 per cent Lord’s baby.Sadly it was announced this morning that rock music’s great crossover pioneer had passed away. Jon Lord had suffered a pulmonary embolism and Twitter started to chirp with heartfelt messages of Read more ...